Full Court Press

So what do we all think of the Leveson report? Or perhaps more importantly, what do we think about what the important people and politicians of various colours are saying about the Leveson report? That's the key point really, seeing as not many of us will have read the 2,000 page dossier.

I did however, watch Hugh Grant's disarmingly charming performance in his new rom com on Channel 4 - "Taking on the Tabloids". I thought the initial storyline was good - principled, slightly rough around the edges but good looking nonetheless, foppish bloke in underdog struggle against big corporation. Unfortunately the love interest curiously never made it into the frame. I assumed she would work for said corporation; they'd initially hate each other but realise love is more important than their political differences and live happily ever after. Like the Coalition. But that didn't happen. He just talked about the press for ages. Some good stuff though.

Hugh and I agree that there's a difference between "in the public interest" and "of interest to the public", thought I don't know if he signs up to my idea that if you effectively make a contract with the press and those who read it that you make your money by their interest in your life (the Kerry Katonas of this world, for example), you have given up some of your rights to privacy. A Venn Diagram here would be most helpful, but I can't be arsed to draw one.

Before you get too tetchy, the long and the short of it is that if you are Jane Q. Taxpayer, the Sun or whoever has no right to publish photos of you topless on a beach on holiday. Yes it is a public place, but by living a non-public life you have a right to things that you put in the relative public space not being broadcast to the world. If you make money as a pop star or somesuch, and you are on the same beach, I reckon it's fair play for the Paps to snap you pups. This is because you put yourself in an overtly public place having got everyone interested in you.

It doesn't stretch to anyone naked anywhere (like for example the poor old Duchess of Cambridge) - if telescopic lenses etc are required to see you, you have gone to enough trouble to remove yourself from the public eye. That has to be then respected as private. And it's not just nudity, but details about your lives etc too. Private is private for everyone, but what is fair game from what is public is down to your 'contract type' and behaviour. It's a shades of grey argument (no, not that like that) which I covered in far more detail here.

So what do I think about press regulation? I'm not a fan. I would also point to the fact that most of the things we think are terrible that the press did were illegal already. Hacking phones is illegal. You don't need new statutes. Use the existing ones. The privacy law idea is always going to be hard to delineate. My 'common sense' approach might make sense (or not) but I imagine it would be hard to enshrine in law.

The press does some pretty despicable things, and there certainly appear to have been very few heads to have rolled, and often not the right ones. I would love to see a better watchdog rather than editors sitting in judgement of themselves. Putting the cat in charge of the cream rarely ends well - just look at the ongoing farce with MP's and IPSA as they continue to stick their snouts in the trough until they are found out (at which point they will apologise for our error in interpretation of their honest mistake and add some transparency that might not have been there before).

But I do not think statutory press regulation is right. Hague makes a very good point that it would do us no favours when trying to take the moral high ground overseas. You could go on forever with examples of when some aberration allowed Parliament to legislate at the thin end of the wedge with only the best of intentions but over time we wandered slowly to the thick end. Income tax started as a one-off levy to pay for the Napoleonic Wars - we all enjoy beating the French but this is taking it a little far (a childish example but you get my drift). Press regulation, as they say, is like pregnancy, and you can't be a little bit pregnant.

But what I really wanted to talk about, partly because I don't have an answer to the press problem; just a gut feeling that statutory regulation is wrong, will be a slippery slope, will have myriad unforseen negative ramifications and is in most cases unnecessary due to existing law, is who is talking about it.

I thought it was brilliant that Ed Milliwho has recently become clairvoyant. He didn't even need to read Leveson's report before he knew, he just knew, that everything in it would be just perfect. Nope, Ed wasted no time working out that Leveson would most likely suggest some form of statutory regulation that would be as unpalatable to the Tories as it would be impractical to apply. So he committed the Labour party (traditional defenders of liberty and freedom, no?) to supporting everything Leveson said and promise to enact any and all recommendations made. Why? Two reasons:

1. He doesn't have to make those decisions as he is not in power so he can make grandiose statements of intent safe in the knowledge they will simply remain just as that (traditional Lib Dem think).

2. It will make for discomfort for Big Dave.

Yup, the bit about Leveson I'm happy to say I have a view on is the behaviour of Red Ed, his party and many Lib Dems. No debate on what is a crucial political topic that could define an entire era, no sensible discourse in Parliament over potentially eradicating 300 years of press freedom. Nope, just political positioning for short term points scoring. One can only hope the British public are intelligent enough to see this and they are punished at the polls. My magic 8 ball suggests the outlook for that is gloomy.

Ed is also one of those who throws all his weight behind people like the McCanns, Christopher Jefferies, Hugh Grant - those who have suffered at the hands of the press. And they have. I should put that front and centre. I have the utmost sympathy for this category of people. I lamented in these pages the court of public opinion's riding roughshod over due process when Christopher Jefferies was essentially convicted of Jo Yeates' murder by the press before he was found totally innocent. But their very intimate involvement with press regulation, or lack of it, if anything makes them totally the wrong people to have at the forefront of statutory legislation.

We put people on trial before an unbiased jury of their peers and subject to the sentencing of a qualified, independent judge for a reason. We don't let the plaintiff adjudicate guilt nor set the tariff. We don't do an eye for an eye. This is not to say that people touched by something are not ever able to be impartial, but it certainly means they are unlikely to be.

People who's loved ones die from a particular disease will often fundraise solely for the charity representing the fight against it; it's human nature. I give more to fighting Alzheimer's and cancer because they are the ones closest to my heart. It doesn't mean that I'm a bad person, or that fighting cerebral palsey is not a noble cause. It just means I probably shouldn't be put in charge of the budget for  disease research for the whole UK: I'm likely to be biased.

People clearly have views - that's fine. MPs might feel one way or another about different diseases or nuclear deterrents or whatever. So might judges. They are expected to put aside their subjective views and examine everything objectively, from the point of view of their constituents and the country. If we think they are sucking at this, we vote them out. Pretty simple.

But the fact remains that those most affected by an issue will in general find it hardest to be objective about it. Which means they shouldn't be the people influencing law. So I say no to Sarah's Law, Megan's Law, Madeleine's Law or any others. Not what is in them - they have fine intent and may be perfectly good pieces of legislation (I am not an authority), but I think composing their content is better left to those professionally obliged to be impartial and experienced in the process of law-making. Is that crazy? I think not. If you would like all of that summarised in a much funnier 1 minute and 42 seconds - listen to Mitchell and Webb's view on it here. I suppose I should have just put that bit at the top and be done with it...

The White Man's Struggle

So I'm going to leave the heavyweight political stuff for a moment - and on a day of such political importance too! I know, I hear you ask "surely you can't be passing up the chance to write about the election of the year?" And I am. Because I couldn't give a fuck. In fact, worse than that, I don't want to vote. No, scratch that; I don't want there to be a vote on sodding police commissioners.

I think it is a shit idea. I don't think accountability is a shit idea. I think politicising the role is a shit idea. A really shit one. What they are really saying is the police service, like other public services is not accountable enough. Once you get high enough, it's hard to get booted out. You have to work really hard at it - you know, start shooting innocent civilians - that sort of thing. But their fix is not to look at the way that the public sector (civil service, police, military et al) promotes, demotes, apportions credit or blame, but instead to put a political figurehead at the helm and get people to vote them in and out.

Now I have no idea for what reason people are going to vote either way today. Some will know of the candidate and like the cut of his jib. Not many I would wager. Others will perhaps vote based on what little propaganda there has been about - and what similar claptrap it all has been. Who was going to put out a leaflet saying they would like to be lenient on crime, on the causes of crime, would like to increase red tape and make the community a less safe place? All total cock. Identical, total cock. No, most likely the Tory supporters will vote for the Tory candidate, the Labour supporters for the Labour candidate and presumably the Lib Dems just think we should all just get along in the shangri-la that exists only in their heads so probably don't need a police force let alone put forward a police commissioner candidate. So the result will have sod all to do with policing, though will have an impact upon it, and everything to do with current political sentiment. Which is pretty stupid if you ask me.

But that's not what I want to talk about today, because it's not really worth the internet paper upon which I have already written it. Nope, today I am gong to bang on for a good paragraph or two about the struggle of the white man - or more specifically the white bread man - against the sandwich Nazis…

I like sandwiches. I like toast. So, it seems do many people. My academic research for this post has been running for a decade or so. As such, it is the most deeply researched topic I have ever written about in this blog by pretty much ten years.

If you were to glance about in the supermarket on your weekly shop (by which I mean the proper, edge-of-town-high-street-murdering-uber-market supermarket that we are all up in arms about but shop at anyway because it's convenient and cheap), you would see almost an entire aisle of bread, I would wager. If you were to take an approximate calculation at the ratio of white to brown bread you would see in the pre-sliced 'Hovis/Kingsmill cuboid of bread in a colourful plastic bag' area, it's about 50:50. By 'brown' I also include granary et al - essentially a nice Nick Griffin-style definition of 'everything not perfectly white and pure'. In the 'fresh out of the in-house bakery' area it's probably 80:20 to the whites (oh, how Mitt Romney would love to see those stats).

I've been doing this for years. The ratios are pretty steady. Brown (or non-white) has been on the rise in the last decade or so as we try to eat more healthily, but it has plateaued. So, it logically follows that demand is about 50:50 at best (for the brown supporters).

Fine. Have your bread any colour you like - very much a personal choice. In a restaurant my wife will always choose the nuts, sun-dried tomatoes, capers and sawdust bread roll on offer (which surely barely makes it bread under advertising standards rules?) whilst I rootle around in the basket looking for something a child would put Dairylee on at lunch break. I have no objection to the healthy stuff. I just think it tastes like old shoes (though new shoes are not on my delicacy list either). I want the one pumped full of sugar and bleached to within an inch of its life. It's like the Coke/Diet Coke idea. If you're going to cheat, cheat big. What's the point of fannying about with Diet Coke? It's still not good for you, but the added bonus is it doesn't even taste good. They do create an amusing line in television advertisements though. Either way, it's pretty clear half the people who want bread want white bread, and half brown.

So why are all the fucking pre-made sandwiches in the world made with brown bread?

Do people who buy white bread only make breadcrumbs or croutons with it? Or toast it and add butter? Or feed it to the ducks? Are only brown bread purchasers turning these bread slices into sandwiches? Surely I cannot be the only person who likes white bread and can't be bothered to make his own sandwiches? Who did this definitive market research? It must be out there, because you can't get a white sandwich for love nor money. Everyone buys into it; supermarkets, petrol stations, newsagents, the lot. Half an aisle of white bread. Half an aisle of brown bread. Brown sandwiches. Bastards. The lot of them.

Every now and again you find a solitary white sandwich in there, probably with a crap filling, like egg and onion. Who is asking for onion in sandwiches? Or salads for that matter, but I digress…?

It upsets me. As you can no doubt tell. We are being discriminated against. We, the proud, unhealthy, white bread eaters of this world. We 50%. Our demographic is being under-represented in the sandwich industry. We need to stand up for our right to a proper pre-made sandwich selection, before it's too late.  I think I know how the suffragettes felt now...

Super-Sized Hospitals

You may have picked up on a theme in this blog that I think one should actually budget one's expenditure against one's income. This is as true for a country as it is for an individual. If you can't afford a new car, don't buy one. If you can't afford a new warship, don't buy one. Or of course, if you think you really need it (car, warship, whatever) more than something else, don't buy that instead. This is not revolutionary.

Which leads me to an article I saw recently bemoaning the fact that "hospitals are inadequately prepared to deal with extremely fat patients". Hospitals are probably inadequately prepared to deal with bombs going off outside them sending hundreds of victims to A&E simultaneously. Or some Hollywood viral epidemic. Lots of things really. Because they have budgets. Which we pay for. So they try to cover most eventualities, most of the time to give a good level of healthcare to the most people. That's the idea.

The article I read focused on a report in the Bulletin of The Royal College of Surgeons of England. It suggested many hospitals were in essence failing fat people - morbidly fat people - by not spending their (ironically) hugely bloated, but still limited resources on providing super-size stuff. Don't know about you but providing a bed that can take more than 28 sodding stone (the current limit of normal NHS beds), or as I like to call it, a small family, is lower down my 'to spend on list' than cancer treatment. So is providing wheelchairs which can take more than 25 stone. Or examination couches designed to take more than 21 stone.

There's certainly an argument that says taking a morbidly obese person to a veterinary hospital to be scanned in a horse MRI machine because they don't fit in the human one at the hospital is a good thing. That might be the kick in the capacious rear required to convince the person in question that losing weight might be an idea. But then I hear the caterwauling about dignity and human rights and other such tosh. You can see which way I lean but I certainly understand it may not all be black and white.

One can certainly argue over the fairness of costing the system lots of money (and thus costing the taxpayer lots of money) by intentional lifestyle choices. When it comes to obesity, you will get ill if you eat too much. Your body can't deal with the cholesterol, the fat, the extra weight on bones and joints etc. We aren't designed that way. And most people who are very fat (the vast majority - no pun intended) chose to be so. I don't mean they get out of bed and say, today I choose to be fat. I mean they choose to eat too much, too unhealthily and not exercise enough. There will be various reasons for going down this road, but it generally boils down to a choice.

It's about willpower. Go to any AA meeting. One of the keys to sobriety is acknowledging you can choose not to drink - you have the power, not the drink itself. Drinking or not drinking is the choice you make. Some will find it easier, some harder to make the 'right' choices. Some will be more prone to making poor choices, some will see it as the only choice, an escape - people who eat/drink/take drugs to get away from something. This is a running theme. The point still remains you intentionally do bad things to your body and John Q. Taxpayer picks up the financial bill.

As you see, the argument is not restricted to obesity, or even drugs and alcohol abuse. One could argue about the fairness of those others who place themselves in harm's way intentionally and expect the NHS to cover the costs - people who play contact sports, racing drivers, parachutists - you see where I'm going with this. The private sector answers this apparent inequality by assessing the risk of your need to claim based on your lifestyle and charging premiums accordingly. The non-smoking healthy jogger gets charged less than the free climbing coke addict. That's from each according to his likely need. That's not the NHS.

The NHS is about trying to fix people whatever, and if you pay your taxes but never need healthcare, bully for you, because you have your health. Which is very noble. But it's not affordable to provide 'total medicine' - every known cure, treatment and facility for everyone and hang the cost. So, I shall leave the question to you to mull over whether we are getting it right morally by funding unhealthy lifestyles. Are we encouraging this 'bad behaviour' by subsidising it? Maybe we have no right to say how people should live? Maybe we do if we are paying for that lifestyle? It is, I am certain, a divisive subject with good arguments on both sides.

What cannot be ignored though, is in a world where we cannot afford all things, we must prioritise. And I think there are going to be a great many things people want money spent on in the NHS before they want titanium re-inforced chairs for the obese. This is for the very same reason that increasing military funding in years when the nation is in no obvious direct threat is not a vote winner.

Especially today, Remembrance Sunday, we can see the gratitude and depth of feeling we in this country have for our servicemen, past and present. However, when it comes to Government spending almost everyone has an interest in the NHS (we all have a granny needing a hip replacement, or at least want to know there's an ambulance waiting to take us a well-equipped hospital should we have an accident), and 93% of us have an interest in public education (because that's where little Johnny will be going to school). But there are only about 150,000 military personnel in this country. When it comes to voting, we get selfish.

So I say, yes, we do need to recognise that our country's weight issue is spiralling out of control. Our morbidly obese has risen threefold in 20 years and is showing no sign of abating. We have huge issues will childhood obesity as we eat more unhealthily and become more sedentary with Xboxes beating playing in the garden. But whilst have to recognise the increasing girth of our population, I do not think the answer can be to simply accommodate it, not least because we have more important things to spend the money on, and not just within the NHS.

The Limited Benefit of Children...

I've been storing up a follow-up post on the issue of child benefit - much of my previous work is here. I'll do it quickly because I don't see the point of repeating everything ad infinitum. The crux of the matter is whilst you have a right to have as many children as your body will allow (note that it is not a  right to have a perfectly functioning body, including reproductive ability), should the state (by which we mean the taxpayer) pay for all kids you wish to produce?

This is the argument raised last week by IDS with the proposal of the two child limit on benefits. There are various caveats, exemptions and anomalies to consider. Not least, the limit of two is one just being proposed as an idea. It is likely that it would only affect newcomers, grandparenting in those already beyond the threshold. I could imagine complications when talking about families with multiple parents - whose kids count, who gets the money etc. Triplets are rare but you can see the problem they might raise. Nobody says this would be easy. Nobody says it would bring in a vast amount of money either. The point that IDS is trying to make (and will probably fail to knowing the Tory party's failure to score open-goal policy wins and the predictable left wing media hysteria) is that the Big Society is about fairness, about responsibility, about one's own actions, not just about how much you can take.

I'm, as you'd expect, with him on this. And so should almost everyone. The majority of people in the country work, pay taxes and to one extent or other, budget their money. Asking them for support for a policy that asks for those being given free money (and welfare is just that) to have to live within their means like they do, or do something in return should be an easy win. This could be limiting to £20,000 net the contribution to rent (which the average worker on about £26,000 gross could never afford) gratis from the Government. Or it could be asking those claiming unemployment benefit to do some voluntary work to break the unemployment cycle and put them on a path to work. Or it could be asking them to pay for their own children if they want to have lots.

But the country is apparently not all behind this rather sensible idea. Nope - and you may forgive my lack of surprise - I heard on Any Questions on Radio 4 quite the opposite. It turns out this policy is one designed to give children cancer. And to force them to spend time with Jimmy Savile. Or something like that. I definitely came away from the programme with the idea this was a deliberately cruel policy designed solely to punish children. Cock. A load of it.

The argument put forward (and raucously applauded by the bus loads of morons the BBC source for an audience) by Dr Katherine Rake of the Family and Parenting Institute was that cuts in child benefits are unfair because they fall disproportionately on the poor. Yup. Because rich people don't generally get welfare; poorer people do. They just pay for it. It is the exact argument used by Nick Clegg and any of his lefty loon pals in the Labour or Lib Dems when any cut of any size or shape is devised which might remove one penny from the purse of someone who is of a financially lower status. They always say "same old Tories, looking to take it first from the poorest, and never from the richest", or to use his favourite phrase "from those with the broadest shoulders".

What Nick et al never mention is that those with the broadest shoulders are already paying a lot. We have started with them. It's called progressive taxation. Those with broad shoulders are paying massive truckloads of money. Dr Rake, and countless others like her, maintain that taking money away from welfare is de facto taking money away from poor children. Yes. To an extent. But it doesn't mean any cut in welfare is punishing children. Poor people often have children. Like rich people. And all the people in between. If you make any cut in welfare you are removing money from many families with children. This simple and obvious fact cannot be allowed to be trotted out as if it is proof that all welfare cuts are evil just because naturally the parents of some children will have been given less money. An increase in the top rate of tax was not touted as a punishment on the children of wealthier homes - but money was being removed (even worse than just less given, surely) from the homes of children. Child cruelty no? Of course not. Just selective lefty bullshit about which children matter and where cuts 'fall'.

If we double the welfare bill overnight (to about £400 billion, or what would then be about 1/2 of all spending) and then took a single pound off, that cut would fall 'disproportionately' on poor families. That fact does not make it a bad policy decision. It is simply because they receive the benefits that others have generally paid for. How they use that money is up to them. There is generally more than enough of it there to keep children fit and well. Just because some people will misuse their handouts and thus punish their own children does not mean we should never decrease the amount of money we give them (see this argument over state-aid for the poor children of nuclear-equipped and space-age countries). It is a senseless argument that the left are yet to confront. Mainly because the right seem to be struggling to make them do so and put it in the right terms.

Cutting one's coat according to one's cloth means adjusting what you spend based on what you can afford. Both Dr Rake and Charles Clarke mentioned they agree with the policy, but when asked how they pay for the Labour-induced deficit, they predictably trot out the same old leftie mantra of not properly defending ourselves by not renewing our nuclear deterrent, or raising more taxes from their favourite golden goose - 'the rich'. This is not cutting one's coat according to one's cloth. The point is that we are spending too much. We need to cut spending. We need to cut spending. WE NEED TO CUT SPENDING. This is CUTTING one's coat appropriately.

We do not have enough money (cloth) as a Government to pay for everything we currently have chosen to spend it on. We clearly have no chance of overnight increasing our tax take by 15-20% to match our spending 'requirements'. So we need to decrease what we spend (our coat). Welfare is a fucking enormous bill. The biggest in fact. It was never intended in its present form even by the most left wing supporters of its creation. It must be reduced. It is costing every working person in this country nearly 1/3 of all the money they hand to the Government in taxation. It is as unhelpful as it is disingenuous of the Opposition (inside the Coalition and outside) to suggest that it shouldn't be reduced - and their reasoning of "not punishing poor children" is as incorrect as it is corrosive.

What is being proposed is a move towards a sensible, affordable rebalancing where welfare stops being a comfortable lifestyle choice. The sooner the Tories can properly explain to the population of this country that cutting one's coat according to one's cloth is about budgeting what to do with what you reasonably have rather than about working out where you can get more money to pay for unaffordable idealogically-driven policies, the sooner we might have a chance of returning to being a country of producers, not just receivers.

Nosey Car-parkers

There's something I don't get. Well, there are many things I don't get; principally amongst them I suppose we could say High School Musical, going to football matches not to watch them but to fight instead and how Labour voters make it through the day without falling down more. But that's not what we're talking about today. Nope, today I thought I'd bring up something which has probably enfuriated almost everybody in this country at one point or other. Imagine the scene…

You are driving on a motorway to visit an out-of-town relative (if you don't like any of your relatives, perhaps imagine you are commuting to work - the key is the motorway, though it happens on A roads too). You start to see brake lights in the distance. You notice the traffic slowing. The last chance to avoid this traffic slips by your window, 3 lanes to the left as you have failed to decide quickly enough whether to come off at the junction and freestyle it through the back roads and are instead trapped in the outside lane by a procession of increasingly tightly-packed decelerating cars. You come to a halt. You issue an expletive and look at your watch. Okay, that's life. You have hit traffic.

You notice that on the other side of the road everything is flowing just fine. You wonder what is going on up ahead? Roadworks? An accident? Well, you're going to find out in an hour and 1.6 miles or so. It's an accident. That's a shame. "I hope everyone's ok" you think. Or if you're now running very late or have screaming children in the back seat accompanying your increased blood pressure, you may think less generously along the lines of "why can't whatever numbskull up ahead drive properly (like me, the best driver in the whole world) - that's an hour of my life I'm never getting back because he can't mirror, signal, manoeuvre" or something along those lines.

Then as you draw closer you notice that the flashing lights are not on your side of the carriageway. Nope. They are restricted to the hard shoulder 40 metres to your right, next to a car with a crumpled bonnet and a car with a smashed tailgate. "Has the accident been so violent as to throw a lorry fully across the central reservation and into 3 of the 4 lanes (motorway dependant) on your side of the road? Surely that is the only reason we have been crawling at a speed not fast enough to show up on either the speedo or the GPS? " you think.

Except you don't.

Because you now know why your side of the road is doing a mile per hour: So everyone can get a good look at what remains of the accident on the other side of the road.

Yup, it is generally the way that an accident screws up the side of the road it is on for a short amount of time whilst they move it out of the way, and then a far longer time on the other side whilst everyone rubbernecks on the way past. What a bunch of belters we are. Are we checking to see if it is anyone we know? Who'd want to find out that way anyway? Are we thinking perhaps we will identify the very situation our unique set of skills were put together for by God himself, ready to swerve to the hard shoulder and sprint across the carriageways to save the day?

Nope, we're all just a bunch of really nosey bastards. We want to look for the same reasons we watch hilarious home videos of chairs collapsing under brides, dancing troupes can canning off the side of a  stage, teenage would-be stuntmen just failing to clear the swimming pool in a single bound and why we like sitting on ski lifts watching the slopes below hoping people will fall over. Schadenfreude. Basically we're all gits.

All the You Tube-ing though costs us nothing. Yet as a collective mass, with slowing down to check on someone else's misfortune, we contribute to our own misery - the traffic jam. It's life's way of paying you back for being a git. Problem is, it catches out everyone on the road, git or not. Even the people like me, who don't feel the need to check out what happened. So, in my totally blameless case, non-git and un-nosey bastard that I am, when I pass the accident the reason I am slowing down is just to check what it was that other people wanted to look at thereby costing me an hour of my life. The gits. If only there were more people like me...

The Postman Used to Ring Twice

So the Royal Mail is thinking of scrapping its '2 tier' system for delivery in favour of a single 2 day service. Super. In other news… Labour are going to balance the budget and Andrew Mitchell is going to be the guest of honour at the Association of Police Authorities Christmas Ball.

Well those aren't entirely accurate comparisons. Thrasher Mitchell clearly isn't going anywhere near the plebs, sorry, the plods, if he can help it. However Labour certainly are going to promise to balance the budget just as Royal Mail may promise to fulfil the new pledge of a 100% 2 day delivery service for a price below first class. And they too are telling porky pies like you read about. Yup, you would have to be a moron (as the current polls tell us over a 1/3 of the country are) to believe either of these preposterous claims.

First class post used to be a same or next day delivery. Now it is not even guaranteed next day. So the service has gone downhill. Where has the price gone? Yup, you guessed it - through the roof. Second class post now averages out somewhere in the region of a week to deliver. Oh, I know you will still find the odd letter now and again that will be delivered quickly, but it is the exception, not the rule.

My point is, Royal Mail will be allowed to scrap the vestiges of the next day delivery and in compensation we will receive a lower price for the new universal mail. For all of 35 seconds. Royal Mail will then be granted another so-massive-it-can't-even-see-inflation-in-its-rear-view-mirror-as-it-laughs-all-the-way-to-the-bank price hike in the cost of the new 'first class' stamp. Because if the fastest you can pay for something to be delivered is now 2 days, this new 'used-to-be-called-second-class class' is their de facto 'first class'.

Yup. And then, you will notice that as the complaints start rolling in that the 2 day guarantee isn't being hit they'll point you to the very small print that states they'll try really really hard to deliver within 2 days, but if they don't make it, it's the thought that counts. What a load of old cock. Quite simply, if Royal Mail are allowed to do this all we will get is a worse service that within a very short space of time will cost more.

Why do I hold such a cynical view? Because my friends, I like many of you have sat in my house, watched the postman walk up the drive and without so much as a knock on the door let alone 2 rings on the bell, post a "sorry you weren't in, please drive miles to collect the mail someone has paid the correct postage to have delivered to your door, oh, and visit only during the hours most inconvenient to you" card (they've shortened it to the bare-faced lie, "sorry you weren't in") and fuck off on his merry way. It is a crap service run with no care, no integrity and no thought for serving the customer or for being allowed to wear the royal insignia.

And by means of a vicious non-sequitor to finish, just so you know where I am on it, Apple's new maps for iPhone is about as much use as mudflaps on a tortoise...

Plumbing the Educational Depths

I thought I should probably write something about conference season. I've been very lax recently and have satisfied my anger at the world with furious note-taking or memo-recording. I suppose I should probably convert some of that diatribe into some internet words…

Nothing new from the Lib Dems or Labour - no surprises from either. The Lib Dems are claiming everything good from the Coalition whilst pretty publicly crapping on their Coalition partners in a desperate attempt to get out of single figures. Oh, and of course banging on about Mansion Taxes and other economically illiterate policies they plan to hold the Tories to ransom over. Labour are still full of themselves and can't remember bankrupting the nation over the last 2 decades. Also, forgive me for not joining the 'oh, isn't Ed Miliwho suddenly very Prime Minister-in-waiting-ey' club. He's still a massive tool. And he still has no policies. Except class envy. That old chestnut. In fact when pressed to say what he might do he has finally owned up to one of the great political white elephants…

Ed maintains that it is stupid for him to tell you what he would do differently because the election isn't for 3 years and we don't know what state the economy will be in. So, just to clarify, because he has no chance of being in power now he will simply bitch about everything the Tories are currently doing whilst providing no tangible alternatives until his 2015 manifesto (which presumably will have to be released the night before the election in case things change).

Yup, he had admitted there is no need for an opposition until election time. Labour may as well head off on a gap yah - nothing to see here, just a bunch of people sitting on green seats whose job is to criticise but definitely not put forward any other ideas.

Actually that's not entirely fair. There is one 'policy', and I use the term vaguely. Let's call it a headline aspiration - it might get a headline and and as there's been no research at all into its viability, not calling it a policy means you can't make a policy U-turn by deciding against it in years to come. Who ever heard of an aspiration U-turn? Anywho, the policy/aspiration is to remember the people that New Labour intentionally forgot - "the other 50%".

Ed is talking here about the other half of the youf population who do not go on to university. You may be old enough to remember Tony Blair setting his wonderfully arbitrary target of 50% of school leavers to go to university. It was not a number arrived at by a clamouring from industry for more media studies graduates, or even more graduates. This was all just a product of class envy. They sold it as 'you can't get a proper job unless you've got a degree like all those posh kids whose parents vote Tory'. What it led to was the uncontrolled increase in Mickey Mouse courses and 'universities' saddling these new graduates with a lot of debt and a useless qualification. I wrote about it a while back here. It totally missed the point of why we taxpayers pay for people to attend university when we don't pay for them to go to Eton. It's a limited pot so let's send the ones who will do the country the most good by being educated a bit more...

Society is broad. The cross section covers all types of people with all types of skills. Some are good at cricket. Some are excellent at kabaddi. There are some gifted painters. Some of this is luck, some of it work, some of it training - nature/nurture. Whatever.

Not all of them are academically gifted. This doesn't mean these types are not clever, though it is certainly true there are also a lot of not clever people in the melting pot. Turn on daytime TV - they tend to be sitting on chat show armchairs screaming at someone with a caption in the bottom corner of the screen along the lines of "I'm throwing out my daughter because she's having a third child by her brother". You know the shows. Remember - one man, one vote. Gotta love democracy. Getting off track…

The point is it was a Labour policy that focused everyone incorrectly on university when it didn't do them or us (John Q. Taxpayer) much good. It was them who forgot the 50% as well as misleading into wasteful courses a good 10-20%. When anyone mentioned that university was perhaps not the best for all involved (taxpayer and student) you were an elitist bastard trying to keep the poor out of the secret garden.

The same is broadly true of secondary education, which is why I for one am delighted by Red Ed's 'idea'. It certainly is about time that we worked out that we can't all be PR men, city bankers and CEOs and that it might be an idea to play to people's strengths rather than patronise them by suggesting academia is the only way forwards. Not just is there not room for everyone to have these jobs, some people will be shit at them - including some who actually do have the jobs I hear you say. For years anyone suggesting offering less academic and more technical courses to those more adept at the latter and less adept at the former was again, you guessed it, elitist right wing scum who was trying to limit the chances of the lower classes by sending them down the mines instead of up to Oxford. Or something like that.

Point is, it's great that the left finally acknowledge that if you take the class envy out of it, academic education beyond 16 isn't for everyone (and probably before 16 for some non-core subjects, though they haven't gone that far). If the last 20 years have shown us anything it is that pushing the academic only route does not raise academic standards and most likely demoralises and devalues the other very viable options. At the very least this has opened up the debate. Like the left finally talking about mass immigration meaning it became ok for anyone on the right to without being branded a racist, we might now get somewhere. For that one thing, I am grateful to Red Ed. There is hope yet in the education system if we are allowed to talk about people not being suited to academia and not being branded as anti-aspirational Nazis. Maybe then we can find suitable education paths for more people and give you an outside chance of your plumber speaking English.

On a side note, and by means of explanation of that last remark I nod my head to the dearth of British people employed in many sectors where they previously dominated - manual and service jobs being the main ones. With a population that is getting shitter at doing things themselves (I read an article recently that put the cost of not being DIY literate at about £150,000 over a lifetime as we 'get a man in' to do jobs our parents and grandparents would knock off in a Sunday afternoon in their 'work jeans') I reckon I'd rather be a master plumber or carpenter than have a social studies degree from the University of Little Crappingdon. Anyway, on that note, I must go - there's a Polish chap at the door here to fix my boiler...